Picross DS

Spiffy:

Iffy:

The harder puzzles can be intimidating for beginners.

There are plentyofpuzzlegames on the DS, but the bulk of them fall squarely into the "block manipulation" category. Well, block manipulation and a few sudoku variants. What if you want a change from the typical puzzle action? Then, my friend, you're going to want to check out Nintendo's upcoming Picross DS. We've spent some time with the import version, and it's gotten us even more fired up for the North American release next month.

Although it's quite popular in its home country of Japan, picross hasn't gotten much attention in the U.S. Still, this isn't the first time that American gamers have gotten a chance to tackle this logic puzzle. Back in 1995, Nintendo released a game called Mario's Picross for the original Game Boy. Despite Mario's presence and an informative, if a bit too involved, print ad campaign (the ad showed an extreme close-up of Mario's face and a block of text explaining the game's rules), the game didn't sell, insuring that the American gamers would miss out on the several dozen other picross titles that would eventually be released on just about every system in existence.

That is, of course, until now. The rules of picross may sound a bit complicated at first, but it's surprisingly easy to pick up once you give it a try. Each puzzle consists of a blank grid, and your goal is to fill in the individual squares to reveal a hidden picture. Numbers along the grid's rows and columns serve as a guide as to which squares must be filled in. The numbers indicate how many squares in a row or column need to be filled in. If there is more than one number in a line, then there must be at least one empty square in-between the filled-in squares.

Usually, you won't be filling in entire rows at once, forcing you to fill in squares that you're certain should be and then do a lot of cross-referencing between the rows and columns to get a complete picture. For example, imagine that you're attempting to solve a puzzle on a simple 5x5 grid. One of the rows is numbered "3," showing that there are three adjacent squares to be filled in there. But which three? There are three possible ways to fill in three squares in that particular row. In all of them, however, the middle square is always filled in. So fill in that square and then move on to the rest of the puzzle. Eventually, the process of elimination will reveal which squares next to it should be blackened. As a helpful guide, you can also place an "X" in squares that you can determine are not supposed to be filled in.